


You Won't Be Alone

by we_could_be_heroes



Category: The Monstrumologist Series - Rick Yancey
Genre: Angst, Illness, M/M, all's well that ends well, declarations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-27
Updated: 2014-08-27
Packaged: 2018-02-15 01:34:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2210718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/we_could_be_heroes/pseuds/we_could_be_heroes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will Henry almost dies. Again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Won't Be Alone

Seven years after Warthrop first led me to the tiny alcove at the top of the house, I drag myself down from it, down the ladder and through the long hallway, to knock on his bedroom door. The hour is unearthly, so late that it is early. I have spent the night twisting and turning in my bed, trying to delay the inevitable, but then finally my own sense of self-preservation forced me to approach the only person who can help me.

“Dr. Warthrop? I think I might be sick.” We haven't spoken to each other for days, two strangers under the same roof. I stand leaning against the door frame, waiting for him to wake up.

“Sick? What? Why?”

In all our time together, I have never had as much as a cold and, with the memorable exception of my encounter with the olghoi khorkhoi and the Typheus Magnificum, have kept myself healthy – a remarkable feat considering the strain of the long hours of work and meager nutrition I've had to endure. Now, I am shivering with fever, my head is pounding and my body aching all over, almost too feeble to keep standing upright.

The first rays of sunlight find Warthrop drawing blood from my arm with a stern look of concentration. Not quite in the condition to protest, I have resigned myself to be tucked into bed in one of the guest rooms. My vision swims; the clink of glass against metal as Warthrop lays the syringe back on the tray tears at my ears. I try to sip some of the tea he makes me, but my throat feels as if someone had clogged it full of cotton.

“Wait here,” he tells me rather pointlessly and leaves my bedside to examine the blood sample. I shiver and sweat under the covers for what seems like years until he returns. He sits down next to me and for a while he says nothing at all.

Then reality slowly dawns on me. The suspicion took root when I awoke in the night in the grips of a severe and unexpected fever and Warthrop's silence now confirms it. The curse which killed my father has finally caught up with me. I would not be spared the deathly effects of the Biminius arawakus after all. My mind is numb from the fever, but the full consequences of the diagnosis do not escape me. So this will be the end.

I see my own reflection in Warthrop's eyes when he finally lifts them to me. “Your condition is dire, but I – I will do everything I can. I think our chances are good, we have gotten ourselves out of tighter spots, haven't we?”

I can tell the falsehood of his optimism at once, he is neither a liar nor an optimist, and I know that he knows too, but I play along. “Yes.”

Warthrop stays true to his word and tries everything there is. I am given a cold compress and a hot compress, a morphine solution and in a truly desperate attempt, even a meadowsweet infusion. Still, all of these remedies only briefly relieve the symptoms and not the cause, so as the day progresses, I get worse and worse.

“I should've done what Pasteur and Roux did,” Warthrop mutters, running a cold washcloth across my burning forehead. It's not been wrung out properly and the water drips into my eyes. “Find a way to counter it. A vaccine. Not rely on _symbiosis_! Ridiculous. Of course the balance can be upturned at any moment.”

He collapses into the chair next to me, raking a hand through his messy hair. “Will Henry, you must hold on for a few days longer. I'll try to find a way.”

My exhausted mind conjures up the image of swarming rats, involuntary test subjects, all sick with the Biminius and all bursting up into splatters of blood and eruptions of tiny white worms, all squealing in agony.

“No,” I whisper, “You know there's no cure. It's too late for that.”

“Forgive me, but when have you become an expert on exotic parasites?” Warthrop asks with forced merriment.

I close my eyes. “There's no time and no point. Stay with me.”

My condition deteriorates further and I sink deeper and deeper into the fever. Floating on the outskirts of consciousness, I don't feel pain anymore, half-awake and half-dreaming. As the real world around me blurs, the inner depths of my soul grow all the clearer and acute fear overwhelms me.

I lift a hand as heavy as lead and call for him. His own hand feels cool and solid; an anchor of safety in the haze of the delirium.

“I'm afraid,” I say. But there's no response; only his cold dry fingers brushing the sticky hair away from my forehead. I feel a new surge of panic: Am I just dreaming him up? Has he decided to leave me to my fate? – until I realize I have not spoken those words aloud. My lips crack when I repeat the confession: “I am afraid.”

“There's nothing to fear.”

I clutch his hand tighter, desperate to keep myself from drowning.

“I'm afraid I will go to hell.”

“No,” his voice is strained in its soothing, “you won't.”

“How do you know?” I force myself to lift my eyelids and focus on his face. I search its familiar features, noting the slight redness of the cheeks. His normally dark brown eyes seem like pools of blackness, reflecting nothing at all.

“There is no hell.”

“But what if there is?"

“There isn't.” He tilts a glass to my lips; it feels ice cold. “Here, drink.”

I shake my head, but then take a sip, just to be a good boy. I can't force myself to swallow though, the simple task suddenly too unrewarding to be worth the pain. I close my eyes again. An eternity passes during which I sweat and writhe under the covers, now entirely in the power of the fever and all the demons it breeds. The sun sets and the room grows dark. Then I hear his voice rip the nightmare apart and draw me away from the precipice.

“Will Henry” - a cold washcloth on my face again - “We both know there can't be a God from which follows that there can't be a hell. But if there is ... if there is one, then I swear to you, you have nothing to fear, for you won't be alone. Even if somewhere ... beyond ... there are the nine circles and the river of blood and fire, you won't be alone. I would never allow it. I would rather descend all the way down than bear the thought of leaving you.”

I don't say anything to that as the curtain draws and I finally lose consciousness.

 

*

*

*

 

When I wake up the following day, the room is bathed in light. The demons of the fever are a distant, muffled memory. I feel thirsty and hungry and still dreadfully tired, but I no longer feel on the brink of death. Warthrop is asleep in the chair next to me and I touch his wrist to wake him up.

Things change afterwards.

I would like to believe it was God or Fate or even Warthrop who rescued me from death's door, but it was in fact only the coincidental behavior of the parasite's population which, having rapidly expanded and reached a peak, slowly declined again and a balance in my bloodstream was restored. Still, I know that while Warthrop could not save my life any more than he could my father's, I now know that he can – and will, if it comes down to it – save my soul.

I ruminate on that thought one night, as I lie awake, watching the soft movements of his breathing.

“Don't you ever get tired of the routine?” Warthrop asks me sometimes when he observes me sticking to certain habits. I always tell him that on the contrary, I like it when there is a certain amount of predictability to a day's activities and that I find it rather calming. The same holds true for me waking up at the break of dawn every day at the precise moment when the first birds begin to sing, just so I can spend some time just thinking, reminiscing.

When it gets slightly less appallingly early, I wake him up by straddling him and nuzzling his face. He tries to push me off and even makes a valiant effort to turn on his side, but I am insistent.

“Wake up,” I say. When he pretends not to hear, I add: “You said you would descend to the seventh circle of hell for me, am I really asking so much of you now?”

“I never specified which circle,” Warthrop mumbles, shielding his eyes with his forearm. “What do you want?”

“Well, what do you think I want?”

I finish reclaiming my position on top of him. He obliges me with ostentatious reluctance, drawing himself up and brushing the hair away from my face while pulling on it, quite perceptibly. He does this sometimes when he's displeased with something I've done: pulls my hair a little too hard, grips my arm a little too tightly, lets his teeth graze my neck a little too much. He cannot possibly be unaware what sort of effect this kind of “punishment” has on me, so I surmise that right now, he isn't _actually_ angry about being woken up two hours too early.

So I gladly let myself be handled, put in the right position and kept in place with a firm hand, and I enjoy every second of my hair being pulled and myself being fucked. It's different in the morning of course, always a bit more rushed and less considerate, as instead of the prospect of the lethargic night, there is the need to start a new day. If it was night, I might, once again, consider sharing a thought with him, perhaps even the one that has been haunting me for a while, the one which intimately concerns my soul. Its delicacy would not stand the exposure to daylight, however, so as we finally break apart and start gathering the strength to leave the bed, I think about the piece that has been missing from my heart for some years now, and how he is the one, the only one, who can ever have it in his possession. Out loud, I say nothing. 


End file.
